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Here’s a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.
A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me “King Arthur Competition” and “King Arthur – Was He Real?” For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.
An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), “Irish Clan Aran Sweaters”, and “Classic Irish Imports”. This truly an easy one, since it’s a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. “No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer…” Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you’ve mis-spelled?
A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings “Groupwise email”, “Ecarboncopy.com”, and “Track Email Reading Time”. These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.
A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is ‘related’. The sponsored links include “OLAP Excel Browser”, “Microsoft Excel Templates”, and “Analysis Services Guide”. A related link is, “Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR”. These are simple word matches – none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.
Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered “Free 4th of July Clip Art”, “Fireworks Weather Forecasts”, and “U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale”. Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.
Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for “Organic Pastas” and “Fine Italian Pasta Makers”. Someone’s doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it’s clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.
Beyond the obvious – you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side – what’s happening here?
Three things:
1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.
2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google’s sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,
3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google’s sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google’s ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.
The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn’t an act of marketing or advertisement?

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I first saw Edward Tufte deliver his well-known seminar Presenting Data and Information in the heady summer days of ’99. At the time, I was working for a small interactive agency in downtown Boston. I’d heard about Tufte’s seminar from a former colleague, and was eager to learn more about Information Design, user interfaces, and whatever else was relevant to creating user experiences and information spaces. Tufte’s seminars also seemed to tap into some sort of transformational mojo; the person I was working with went in as a Web Developer, and came back a Usability Specialist. The logic of this still escapes me, since I haven’t heard the esteemed Professor mention usability, let alone lecture on it yet: I think it’s more a good lesson in how desperate Seth was to escape writing HTML.
But I’m getting away from the point.
In ’99, Tufte delivered a solid and succinct grounding in Information Design history and principles, supported by frequent references to his gorgeous self-published titles. Bravo.
He promptly followed this with a short segment on “The Web”, which was mostly irrelevant, and wholly behind the times. Professor Tufte’s chief gripes at the time included excessive use of chrome on buttons, bulleted lists, and unformatted tables. He was mired in recounting the failings of HTML 2.0. Outside, it was 1999. But in the lecture hall, it felt more like 1996… I was embarrassed to see an old master dancing poorly to new music.
Forward five years, and now clients are asking me to attend Professor Tufte’s presentation in New York, again in the summer. I expected to be severely disappointed; if Tufte was this far behind when there wasn’t much history in the first place, then it could only have gotten worse.
And so I was pleasantly surprised. The Information Design showcase was like refreshing cool rain after too much time using low-fidelity charting applications. But what really caught my ears was his ready embrace of core Information Architecture language and outlook. Dr. Tufte is hip to IA now. He even gave us some good homework: the session handout lists 11 classics of 20th century Information Architecture – on page 2, right after the day’s agenda.
Yes, his piece on the Web was still a bit behind – static navigation systems and generic corporate marketing site IA aren’t exactly cutting edge topics, and it’s hardly open-minded to say that there’s no reason for having more than a single navigation bar at the top of a page – but at least it was behind in the right direction.
And it was still nice outside.
Kudos to the old master for picking better music.
And for being canny enough to know that it’s good for business to encourage eveyrone to take notes, but not provide note paper in the regstration packet – its for sale of course at the back of the hall…

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